


isn't it time?

by shortcrust



Series: the good times (they aren't only in the past) [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Character Study, Developing Relationship, F/M, Long-Distance Relationship, Personal Growth, Post-Canon, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26578075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortcrust/pseuds/shortcrust
Summary: Nile begins her travels of the world. She wants, though she doesn’t, though she will.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman
Series: the good times (they aren't only in the past) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1962949
Comments: 25
Kudos: 137





	isn't it time?

**Author's Note:**

> Please ensure Creator's styles/skins are turned on! This fic should hopefully stand alone just fine, but you may get more out of it if you've read [just wasn't made for these times](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26124004) first.

Like a kitten kept trapped inside until it learns where home is, Nile settles into her new life within four stone walls. They left London by car for an untamed stretch of coastline, where heather grows wild beside swampy peat bog. The weather takes a poetic and abrupt turn, and the rain and wind are horizontal where they hammer into the wooden-framed windows. 

While locked down, they run drills. The mismatched sofa and chairs are pushed against the walls and Nile hits the threadbare rug again, and again, and again, until she doesn’t anymore. It takes Andy three weeks to establish that she is able to hold her own in a fight, and then one more to scratch the surface on all the potential ways she cannot. 

Time feels slippy and loose, like she’s fallen into a fast moving stream. She tries, desperately, not to get carried away. But days blend easily into one another. Someone makes dinner each night on an old enamel Rayburn range and they rotate on who washes up afterwards, hanging the cast iron and copper pans on little hooks above the stove top. The food is usually unpretentious, simple soups or stews creatively spiced and placed on the table with toasted bread. There is no place near enough from which to order any kind of carryout, and they limit themselves to one weekly trip to the grocery store a twisting forty minute drive away.

It is explained to her that this is the standard procedure after a close call; a period of laying low, off the grid. Nile feels like she is being put away to hibernate for the winter.

Each morning she goes out for long jogs along the narrow coastal footpaths. She will never get stronger or faster, healing superseding the natural process by which microscopic tears turn to stronger muscle fibre. But basic training, and her mother before that, taught her to value discipline. Every day the dawn is grey and the sea nearly black, all bar the foam it whips up and the salt it sprays onto her skin. Pretty soon it all begins to treat her hair pretty poorly, so she buys a hand-knit beanie of buttery wool from a nearby handicraft store located in what amounts to an old woman’s front room.

One day, afterwards, she returns back outside cradling a cup of sweetened coffee. The warmth melts into her fingertips. Joe joins her on the back step of the cottage; a little flat flagstone area with a low wall, just deep enough to stand on before you risk tumbling down into the roughage and rocks. His hands are in his pockets. 

“For a long time,” he opens, after a moment of staring into the middle distance, “going away to the countryside was something done to heal from one’s maladies.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

He shrugs. “Only in hindsight did we realise that the benefit mainly lay in cities being full of coal soot and asbestos, so.”

Nile elects not to read too much into that. They stand in soft silence. The sea is wild below them but here in the lee of the house the wind falls away, as if they are standing inside the eye of a storm. The extent of their isolation is oppressive, loud in its quiet and teeming with its solitude. The whole rest of the world could fall away, leaving them the last handful of people left alive, and Nile highly doubts they would know anything about it.

Joe reaches wordlessly for her empty mug. She hands it over then unfastens the buttons that let her pull the mitten ends over her fingerless gloves. She bought them, of course, to match her hat.

Her world shrinks to infinity and the handful of people with whom she will share it. When they return to civilisation - to their coal soot and their asbestos - and the bars of her phone signal climb steadily, Nile finds a reason to send a text message. It turns out Booker is in Canada. Nile's never been. Swiftly, however, she starts crossing off countries. 

Her residence in the coast house had a surreal, dream-like quality, but the rapid-fire world travel that commences shortly afterwards forms a different kind of haze. At first she tries to remember places; landmarks, cityscapes, map grids and co-ordinates. They spill over into one another. Instead, she commits sensations to memory; the hot bubble of blood from a through-and-through, Nicky adjusting her grip on a compound bow, the froth of _teh tarik_ clinging to her upper lip.

 _That_ , she decides, _I will recall. I want that to matter to me._

Nile makes to move as part of the team, a solider following command. It is the second of her resolutions that falls apart, before she pieces it back together from the wreckage into a different shape. Andy may be a leader but she's not a drill sergeant. Instead she's more the figurehead at the front of a ship, the flag before the rallying cry. She can say what she wants for the melodrama but Nile has not joined an army, not really. Andy is a teacher and a guide, before she is anything else. Nile is left feeling like the smallest figure in a set of nesting matryoshka dolls, just trying to figure out how to follow the lead of what has come before. She thinks she made a strong start, but there’s always room for improvement.

In her defence, she was holding her own just fine until the grenade.

Thrown backwards up against a wall, Nile surveys the situation she's found herself in. It emerges from the half-darkness, illuminated in fragments of light from gunshots and flashbangs. There's a lot of grey concrete, the room huddled with a dwindling number of moving shadows. Nicky plunges his sword into a man’s chest and drags it upwards in graceful, brutal motion like he’s gutting a fish. Red viscera splatters wetly onto the floor.

Blocking Nile’s view, Andy drops down into a crouch in front of her. The sounds, unmistakably, continue. “You good?”

Nile looks at her own midriff and gasps. “Oh, shit. Is that my liver?”

Andy briefly flicks her eyes, down and up again. She nods. “Yup.”

“Fuck,” Nile declares empathetically. Her head falls back and she grits her teeth, feeling the now familiar sensation of her cells knitting themselves back together. It’s certainly painful but the more unpleasant aspect it that is excessively, aggressively itchy.

“Chalk this one up to experience, kid.” Andy grips her at junction between her neck and shoulders and squeezes. 

“I’m fine,” Nile reassures. “Go.”

Seated where she fell, Nile watches the masters at work. 

  
  
  
For the last time I'm in Calgary  
  
Not a spaghetti western  
  
How many times did the tour guide mention rodeo, did you say   
  
Fair point  
  
I'm still not saying it though  
  


Their group slips silently across the Russia-Ukraine border in the middle of the night, and Nile is struck with the awareness that she is rapidly shaping up to have spent more time on this continent in the last year than in any other. She wonders how that list would tally for the others, across years and decades. With lifetimes to spend, what landscapes would draw you most strongly? She can't yet determine if she'd want that which reminded her of home, or those that don't, or if after a while those two things kind of blur together.

There is time, Nile supposes, to figure it out. She's only a child. 

That said - all she has seen, and all she has experienced, feels already more than enough for one person's lot. All at once Nile feels untenably, unimaginably young. _How,_ she wonders, _can so much be packed down into just one life_. Already she carries so much fear and joy and grief and love that Nile feels like she will burst with it, like the human heart was simply not made to contain this much sheer being.

Every time Nile takes a life or saves one she feels like someone is marking that moment onto her very spine, carving a tally mark on a cell wall, and it's there with her forever making her lighter and changing the way she walks. Andy's bones must be worn down thin as a bird's. Booker may have watched the last Tasmanian tiger die, but there were still wooly mammoths alive when their leader was born.

Andromache is the ancient coal seam burning for thousands of years under New South Wales. Nile is more like the Livermore centennial lightbulb.

Nile slides open the glass patio door. This apartment isn't a known quantity, isn't a safehouse with books on the shelves and knives taped under the tables. It came courtesy of an old friend of Copley's and, surprisingly, the very same old friend of Andy's. The boys are still sweeping the rooms. The front door is bolted, and Andy seems committed to spending the remainder of the night glaring out into the darkness from the square of concrete that forms the battlements before a scrubby garden. She's sat on a red plastic chair that has gone pink at its corners, sharpening her labrys with a whetstone. There's a porch light above the door, and Nile steps out into the crisp air through a dense cloud of bugs.

"Hey, Andy?" Nile opens, over the faint buzzing of the lamp. 

Andy looks up. There's a control in her every action, like a predatory cat using only a fraction of its power. Her face quirks, inviting a question.

Nile doesn't have one, as much. Nonetheless, she drags over the other plastic chair. 

"Can we talk?"

They help in Ukraine, _ish_. Things definitely get worse during the time in which they're there but Nile is reasonably certain that's not directly on them, so, that's fine. But things speed up and don't slow down, and within a matter of days foreign governments are putting up travel bans and branches of infrastructure are shutting down like failing circulation to a dying limb. Normally she'd text Booker a hint about where they're moving to next; it's a game, a back and forth, a connection to one numbered person in her small collection of people. She doesn't this time, partly because he's being a little asshole, and partly because the borders are about to close and they still don't _fucking know_.

Andy drops the last of their luggage in front of the door. It makes a heavy metallic thud when it hits the ground. "What have we got, Joe?"

"Not much. Freight rail is down, and passenger lines are domestic only. Your buddy isn't taking my calls, so they are now off the greeting card list."

She sets her mouth in a firm line. "Military options?"

Joe looks up from the laptop, scrunches his nose and makes a vague and non-committal hand gesture. "Not sure I'd risk it, boss. Paying off a crew isn't prohibitive but it would certainly be difficult to hide, and I feel I hold the majority opinion in not being a _tremendous_ advocate for disposing several bodies' worth of conscripted teenager." 

"Commercial is is, then," says Andy, sounding as if she is in physical pain. "What IDs has everyone got on them?"

Nile reaches in to the front pocket of her holdall, and fans out a half a dozen driving licences like a hand of playing cards. She reads the names aloud. “Jordan Cary, Shannon Smith, Tana Kend-"

“Smith!” Nicky waves a passport in the air. “I’ve got a Smith!” 

“Congratulations,” said Andy, pulling it from his fingers and placing it with Nile’s own. “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

Shortly thereafter, Nicholas Smith and his young bride travel out of Boryspil International on a repatriation flight for citizens of a country which neither of them belong to. Joe and Andy follow shortly thereafter on three separate flights from two different carriers, taking whatever seats they can get, unwilling to steal space from other passenger groups and spreading themselves thin should unrest spark at heady mile-high altitudes.

Once at their destination, Nile sits in the timeless, lawless wasteland of an airport _TGI Fridays_ for the thirteen hours it takes their family to knit itself back together again.

She drinks a root beer float and watches Nicky sip dispassionately at his fourth frozen blue cocktail, each of which has been served in a culturally insensitive 'tiki' glass with a slice of pineapple speared on the rim. The nibbled pineapple rinds of drinks gone-by litter the tabletop like fallen soldiers. Nicky is his own person, but he is also half of an enviable whole, and given that the separation of the two parts was not entirely of their own volition he is understandably restless. 

In her pocket, her phone buzzes. Only five people have her number. One is sat right beside her, two have their phones switched to inflight mode or might have just crushed them under a boot heel, and one is probably desperately attempting to ensure that all of those aforementioned are spuriously overlooked by every piece of analogy and digital recording equipment in the vicinity. That leaves only one option. 

She pulls the phone out. Waiting on her homescreen is a single text, so short it doesn't even push the message bubble off into an ellipses.

  
Sorry. That was fucked up   
  
*you  
  


Her response is immediate; a quite, confident statement. She knows what she deserves, and will not accept blame for discord when it rests solely on someone else's shoulders. She lays her phone face-down and pokes the last remaining globs of ice cream with her congealing paper straw.

It takes several, stretched feeling minutes before it beeps again.

  
Yeah   
  
I can't be your therapist, Booker  
  


There's too much at stake between them, between _all_ of them, for the lines to become blurred. Sure, she's only an outside observer, but it is with the fresh pair of eyes bestowed upon her by this perspective that Nile can see that clearly. You look to everyone to be your everything, and you will only be disappointed at their failure to encompass what you need them to be.

In another world she might have been worshipped as a goddess, but in this one she is a woman.

  
Yeah   
  


She is expecting some push back, perhaps something aimless and self-effacing. The trademark sign-off of a man asking to be left strapped to a table. The response surprises her. She feels her eyebrows raise of their own accord. 

"Huh," says Nile aloud.

"Hmm?" asks Nicky, looking up. While she's been distracted, he has assembled his pineapple rinds into a little leaning structure.

"Nothing," she reassures, resting her phone gently on the table, though it certainly does not feel that way.

If the others have guessed that Booker is also in Paris, none of them let it on. They arrive in the city with a job to do, and all other thoughts are off the table. Nile takes the path of least resistance and elects for her part to do nothing with the information.

When the job is complete, however, the decision is rather taken out of her hands.

Their current abode is a hole in the wall, a former loft apartment fallen into obscurity through neglect. The visual signifiers of decay, and a forged _Conseil de Paris_ public health notice, thankfully stop just after the threshold. Inside it is remarkably well kept. Still, being here makes her skin crawl. Earlier in the week an owl came out of the rafters while she was showering. The living space is cute though, a kitchen comprising only one counter with a little serving-hatch window in the wall that looks on into the lounge.

Nile is nestled on an old couch that all the stuffing has fallen out of, with one leg propped up and her arms looped around it. Her chin is balanced on top, until she tilts her head and instead squishes up her cheek with the knob of her kneecap.

“Know what’s weird?” Nile announces, apropos of nothing, over a commercial break in reruns of some weird 90s gameshow. “If I think too much about my family I want to cry so I, like. Don’t do that. But you know who I think about? Who I really miss? My cat.”

Nicky nods sagely. He is sat across from her in a leather armchair. “Best cat we ever had was in Naples, 1810s. White, very fluffy. Her name was -," he fumbles, and folds his mouth into a confused line.

Over the sound of frying onions, Joe shouts from the kitchen. “Bianca!”

He flaps a hand over his shoulder in an easy gesture of acknowledgement. “Left her with our upstairs neighbour for the relief effort at Tambora.”

“Neat,” remarks Nile after a pause, because what else can she do with that information, really, other than file it with all the other Wikipedia articles she’s not allowed to edit.

Nicky stands to go fetch them a drink. There is the sound of a fridge opening. His voice is thoughtful. “Where is...," he trails off. There is then the sound of a fridge closing again, and it seems to reveals a new line of sight. Nicky audibly gasps. “Andy! That was for the _moules-frites_!”

At the living room's corner table, pouring over a map, Andy grins around her wine glass. “Oops.”

“Nile!” Joe sticks his head around the kitchen door. He waggles his hand at her to get his attention. “Run down to the little SPAR on the corner and pick up another bottle of white? Please?”

She runs down to the little SPAR on the corner and picks up another bottle of white. She also adds a bag of violently neon-coloured gummy worms to her basket, as a finders fee.

There’s a pretty small queue, but Nile knows her purchase is time-sensitive, so she leans around it to see how many people are working at the checkout. There’s only one, and they seem to be just finishing up with serving someone. A man is loading a bottle of moderately expensive whisky and a bag of apples bearing an end-of-day _Reduced_ sticker into a reusable canvas shopping tote.

Nile - through a brief meeting months and miles ago - would recognise him anywhere. 

The cashier pushes the bag towards him and offers the receipt and - God, Booker does the white person smile. He flattens his lips and puffs out his cheeks into little, polite dimples and Nile has to duck behind a display of gum and granola bars to hide both herself and her laughter.

Later, two wine bottles are empty in the recycling, and Andy and Nicky draw the short straws for dish duty.

Nile thumbs her phone open. 

  
  
  
Cute  
  
Any reason?  
  
Just made me think of you   
  


It was not long into their whistle-stop tour around the globe that Nile had began to get the impression that everyone - or, she notes in deference, almost everyone - being together for repeated missions across an extended period of time was somewhat uncommon. Initially, she believed it to be for her benefit, and puffed up with both gratitude and a prickly indignation. However, she soon realised, this went beyond her. 

Andy is determined, driven, and moves like a woman possessed. Apathy for the world has been traded in for an unquenchable crusade to bring it justice. She throws herself and by extension their group against obstacle after obstacle, mission after mission, waves against the hull of an immovable boat. One job steamrolls straight in to another. Nile barely has a spare moment in which to draw breath, sometimes. That said, she did not have much time in which to accrue a huge knowledge of Andy prior to the change in pretty much everything about both of their lives. Plus, despite wielding the accumulated fury of an ancient warrior, Andy never forgets to see her; she gives Nile direct notes and constructive criticism sandwiched between genuine praise. 

So it takes a while for her to clock that this is apparently not quite the norm. Once she does, however, she can’t unsee it. 

Things start to feels untenable, very slowly at first and then very quickly. They are beginning to be stretched thin. The day after a job wraps, following a soft epilogue of an evening, everyone walks on eggshells until the peace breaks and the phone rings with Copley’s next instructions. The man is under strict orders to keep them coming thick and fast, and when the call comes the machines of everyone’s bodies need to creak back into life mere hours after grinding to a stop. Joe and Nicky keep meeting one another’s eyes at these moments, a desperate _are you seeing this too_ flitting electric across their gaze when they think no one else can see. They hold their tongues.

Nile prides herself on, when the moment calls for it, not heeding the good sense that God gave a rock.

“Andy,” she says, as they pack the Paris apartment back into dormancy. “We need to slow down.”

In response, a folder lands heavy in Nile’s lap and a thick wad of paper spills out. “Read that,” Andy instructs, already turning away. “We’re jumping on a train tonight.”

Nile shuffles the pages back inside the manilla cardboard, and places it gently on the tabletop. She aligns the corner neatly with the right-angled edge of the aged wood. “No,” she says mildly. “I don’t think we are.”

In the far corner Nicky looks up, carefully observing, but stays silent. Andy, too, doesn’t need to say anything; the fire in her eyes is a sufficient rebuttal.

Nile watches as Andy stalks across to the room which she has been using, drags a duffel out from under the bed, and begins dropping various weapons into it. 

While emptying a clip she says, short, “There are people out there who need our help.”

Nile notes that no further clarification of her objection was requested. The situation is self-evident. She throws her arms up in the air. “ _You_ are people!” _And, frankly, you seem like you need some help,_ she wisely does not add. Instead, she gestures to herself, because she thinks it will go down better. “I am people! We need to rest.”

Andy doesn’t deflate but she does stop. Her hands rest on the butt of a disassembled rifle. “What good are we,” she states rhetorically in a dead voice, “if we sit by and do nothing.”

“What good are we, if we are too strung out to be of use.” Nicky makes his way over in soft, socked feet. His tongue prods at the open corner of his mouth, a tick of his when thinking hard. “You have no penance to pay, Andromache.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.” 

Nicky spread his hands. 

Into the approaching silence, Nile offers her two cents. Last night was special, but she does not want a life of _last nights_ , each only the remains of a hollowed-out day. “I think I might want to, you know, _live_ some part of my eternal life at some point. If that’s cool with you.”

They lock eyes. There's a reminder of a conversation in that look, and an understanding is made clear. Nile will not have forever with this woman. She will not have a thousand years in which to collect myriad memories. She is committed to making use of every moment she has.

The tension melts out of Andy’s body. She knocks back her head and groans long and loud in the direction of the ceiling. She elects to address it instead of them.

“What now, then?” The question is wry, self-effacing. It’s a bad look on her.

“Now?” offers Joe. Nile turns her head; he is leaning jauntily against the door behind them, one leg crossed over the other. “Now we go on holiday.”

They touch down on Santorini on a sunny day into a minuscule airport quickly dwarfed by the military transport on which they are piggybacking. The scale of things are off here, she thinks, as someone fishes out cash for the taxi driver. The hillside town into which they arrive feels like a miniature set built of tiny, mismatching pieces. Everything is white and blue, rolling into one another in a gorgeous, co-ordinated mess.

__

The apartment, unlocked by both an oversized skeleton key and a 12 digit key pad, is small in size but commanding nonetheless. The floors are smooth and the walls are curved and cave-like, cool to the touch as if they are hewn out of the cliff itself. It has a tiny kitchen space which the bedrooms split off from, cutting the round tower into pizza slices. She takes the third of three bedrooms, a small and unadorned single absent of furniture bar a low pine chest at the foot of the bed and an empty floating bookshelf on the wall. 

__

They head out for dinner. “Wear something nice,” Andy instructs. Her tone is firm, but there is a referential softness behind it. She seems a little looser. Nile pulls on a sundress that ties in oversized ribbons above her shoulders.

__

They walk to a restaurant with sweeping views of the azure sea over a low stone wall. The white tablecloth flutters in the salted breeze, held down around the edges with silver clips. Nile fiddles with the one in front of her, flicking the metal against the fabric surface.

__

After a moment the waiter appears, and Joe orders without consulting anyone. “A bottle of the house rosé and four glasses. And your largest meze platter, please.“

__

The wine is so sugary that it takes the enamel off of Nile’s teeth, but chasing it with soft and oiled vine leaf parcels feels decadent. The evening stretches languorous, rich and memorable. The sun dips below the horizon and paints Nile’s skin in burnished gold. Hours later they return to the villa; Nicky and Joe arm-in-arm, Andy with hands in the pockets of her linen culottes, and Nile with her arms thrown out either side as she walks along a wall at the side of the road. The cobbles make her feet wobble side-to-side unsteadily. Maybe she’ll fall and break an ankle. Carefree and giggling with it, she does not mind. 

__

In the week she stays there, Nile fills the room like a bowerbird prettifying its nest. The shelf accumulates bangles made of silver and turquoise and coral, a bottle of anise-flavoured ouzo, and a painted canvas of a seascape. She is by now used to staying unspoken in Booker’s old spaces, and has mingled their marks and possessions determinedly. She will not be left to feel ashamed of her existence. Nonetheless, it is strange joy to put her stamp upon this place first. His will join her’s one day, she knows, in this world that has long waited for him to claim it. She will leave space, space for his own titles next to her acquisitions selected from the famed and cavernous Atlantis Books. 

__

On the last morning of her stay, she extends him the invitation.

__

__

__

__  
  
  
_ _

_  
_

He returns what she reads as a tentative acceptance. _I am not quite there,_ says an image of a dusty clay-built cityscape. _Not quite yet._

__

__

__

__  
  
  
_ _

_  
_

They’re extracting a politician whose rivals are wanting to expedite the passage of a bill through the _Congresso Nacional_ through rather blunt means. Their movements need to be precise, so Copley has made them an itemised timetable; he emailed it over via their secure server which has a rotating encryption and then Nicky, for some inexplicable reason, printed it. 

__

Joe plucks it from his fingers, consults his watch, and reads aloud. “We are currently on schedule to arrive at the hotel at 2100 where we will then change and prep for the gala.” He flicks his eyes up over the top of the sheet. “At which point, by the way, I predict we will no longer be on schedule. Our limo will leave at 2125, or approximately five minutes after whenever it is Andy condescends to place herself inside a tuxedo, and by the time that we arrive we will have roughly an hour to mingle and make contact with Delgado.”

__

Declaratively, Andy finishes. “Whoever has him, get him to the balcony for the extraction at 2230. Be discreet.”

__

Nile pours herself into yards of sea-green silk, twists her hair into a halo around her head, and later finds herself giggling demurely over a champagne flute until she’s able to slide a hand into the crook of their target’s elbow. 

__

“Senator,” she whispers in to his ear, “your life is in danger. Follow me.”

__

Later, the dress pools like liquid at her feet when she trades in Louboutins for slipper socks with little sticky grippy dots on the soles. Emerging in to the kitchenette, Nicky thrusts a mug of hot chocolate under her nose. 

__

“100% cocoa,” he says with a smile. “You get the whipped cream, because you won the day.”

__

She wiggles her toes, warm, and begins to feel as if perhaps she could. 

From one drink to another. After covertly repatriating some antiquities they celebrate with Pimms in a pub garden on the outskirts of Bath, England; a spiced beverage with floating pieces of orange and cucumber that bump up against her lip every time she takes a drink. There are allotments on the other side of the fence, and the air smells strongly of honeysuckle. Condensation beads down the side of her pint glass and she draws patterns of loopy interlocking circles using the base of it onto the wood of the table. Nicky might have grown up illuminating manuscripts, but Nile had a motherfucking spirograph. The drink slips downs down a treat, cool in the confident warmth of a fading afternoon, and they order another jug. 

__

Nile has been thinking a lot about alcohol, recently. She wasn’t lying to Booker when she referenced her unwilling secondhand knowledge of lagers and pilsners, though she was when she pointed him towards the alcohol-free versions. She’s never tried them, but it only takes an off-hand remark for her to hopefully plant the idea in his head. It’s up to him if he acts on it. She likes a drink, sure, and she’s not going to deprive herself of the pleasures the world lays indefinitely at her feet. But how the others seemed to drink at first had scared her a little.

__

She is not chasing things, nor hiding from those that are chasing her in turn, when she fishes into her glass and then that of those around her for the remaining liquor-soaked strawberries. She wants only the edges smoothed, like a well-thumbed photograph, on the sweetness of a late summer day. 

Nile had never texted an actual picture from her actual camera to Booker, not before Santorini. His exile was not an act conceived for the purpose of paying penance to _her_ , no, but it wasn’t just her own life she was offering a window into should she send along snapshots from the ever-shifting kaleidoscope view of their lives. The lines had once been clear in her mind, but they had started to blur the more that she recieved pictures from Parisian art galleries and Vietnamese night markets cheerfully in her inbox.

__

Booker is fun when he texts, is the thing. She didn’t expect it. When he shows her things, he seems genuinely excited to share them. When he doesn’t, he’s dry and whip quick and when he meets her on that level what she wants is to give just as good as she gets. 

__

Most of the time. 

__

  
haha   
  


This is what he gives her to work with. She’d waited to see if more were forthcoming but nope, that is apparently it. Like getting blood out of a stone.

__

_What can you even_ do _with that?!_ Nile thinks. _Where is the dialogue, where is the witty repartee._ Goddamn, for all that he’s spent several hundred years naming his aliases after the written word, he somehow inexplicably manages to text like such a fuckboy. 

__

It is in this spirit that, after fruitless minutes of staring at the blinking cursor in the message box and failing to find inspiration, that Nile just brings up the whole window of his contact information and hits _call_.

There is an awkward and unfamiliar mood in the Giza air, a kind of tense energy as they sit in in a holding pattern, keen to get the drop on the shipment they're here to intercept but waiting for the right time to move. The mood is not helped by the weather which, despite Nile’s prolonged tenure in a different desert, is absolutely far hotter than necessary. Joe dedicates himself to cleaning their guns, corresponding with Copley, and any other activities he can complete sat directly in front of the asthmatic puff of the air conditioner unit.

Andy can hit pause temporarily, it seems, but struggles to actually lower her speed. She is a woman of extremes. This, Nile feels, they have in common. They're both trying. Andy paces until she seemingly realises she's not meant to be doing that sort of thing any more, and then she sits on her hands and twitches. 

Nile casts her mind back in equal parts to her CO-mandated CBT, and to the advice the school counsellor used to give her brother. “Have you tried yoga?”

“Kid,” Andy says, levelling her a look. “I’m older than yoga.”

Nile snorts. “I’m older than TikTok, doesn’t mean that I get how it works.”

They pull up a series of videos of a pretty lady in a clean white room, who says things about their ‘heart energy’ and letting it ‘radiate forwards’, which sounds like bullshit until Nile pulls herself up into a position like the Great Spinhx outside and feels her blood burn electric somewhere between her chest and her throat and thinks, _holy shit_. 

Joe eventually announces an update; probably another two or three days before they need to move. 

The next morning dawns even hotter, the sun baking the earth like bread, and Nile admits that her morning 5k would be a bad call. She still wakes early. Between her and the coffee maker however, in the strong morning light, is Andy. She has two small rugs, the sort they sell at a covered market stall, rolled up beside her. They’re completely the wrong kind to use for yoga. 

Andy tips her head towards them anyway, and Nile reaches with a smile.

“Okay, final round,” says Nile, looking at the grocery list, phone between her chin and her shoulder. They have an empty fridge to fill. “What do we think ‘yogurt (red)’ means? Is it yogurt in a red carton? Or is the yogurt itself red, like, strawberry flavor?”

__

“Hmmmm,” ponders Booker. “Who wrote the list again?”

__

“Joe.”

__

The answer comes immediately. “Yogurt in the red carton.”

__

Nile throws up her hands. Next to her, a woman selecting bagels startles. “How do you just _know_ that!?”

__

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” he says, the beginnings of a smile in his voice.

They’re laid out on reed mats on a secret beach on a tiny island in the South China Sea. Around them, marine biologists are monitoring and measuring the sea turtles that are hauling themselves to shore, this one night a year, to bury their eggs like precious treasure below the sand.

It’s pretty heartbreaking, the fact that this warrants a protection detail, but it’s a glorious night. Moths the size of dinner plates keep trying to land on Nile’s face. One by one the stars switch on above them. 

“You used to be able to see more, right?”

“Oh yeah,” says Andy. Her hands are crossed into a pillow behind her head. She seems wilder here; not feral but untamed, less hemmed in where their only roof is the solid diamond slab of the Milky Way. “More than you can imagine.”

“That was how we found each other,” offers Joe. “Crossed the seas and continents by celestial navigation.”

He sits up, fishes around in the shopping bag they brought over from the mainland. He liberates the bag of mini brioche rolls, sticks one in his mouth, and fakes out passing the rest over Nicky’s head into the grabby hands Nile is making. She eventually manages to snatch them, reflexes honed, and he nods approvingly.

From underneath this fraught transaction, Nicky adds, sagely, “We would set up a camp, make msamman over the fire, and wait for the moon to rise.”

With sweet dough between her teeth, Nile wonders if this is the permanency of the human condition; baking bread, and watching the stars. 

They're already back in Italy because like, what even is a carbon footprint, huh. They were only in Venice a few weeks, though Nile still has a sneaking suspicion that trip was just her being bought, and amounted to an apology for the fact that she has become acquainted with the appearance of her internal organs on one too many recent occasions. It worked, though. She had fun. By contrast, Florence is underwhelming, though Nile appreciates that it's most likely because she only has the ability to see a tiny fraction during their momentary visit. An iceberg is underwhelming until you hit it. She’s here to stop women being forced into sexual slavery, not look at a thousand churches and their million coloured tiles. She'll be back. 

__

She tries to make the most of the visit, anyway. On the final and indeed only dawn of their stay, she wakes up early and puts on comfy shoes, trading morning yoga with Andy for grabbing tickets to the Uffizi. She wants to see Gentileschi’s _Judith Slaying Holofernes_ which - in a word - slaps, but by the time she navigates the gallery’s marbled halls that which really draws her up short is a series of colourless sketches. 

__

There are open notebooks under glass, page after page forming clear, distinct figures from aborted half lines that nonetheless make simple and evocative gestures. Beside great canvases of oil and acrylic they surely look like scribbles, but something evidently does not need to have been perfected to be coherent. In a hall of masterworks, these say; I am complete, even though I am not yet finished. 

__

Nile grips the metal edge of the display case for several long minutes, until the next tour group comes along behind her for their own private epiphanies. 

“I’m still working through some Netflix recommendations. I’m curious to know if there’s anything you particularly like, though.”

__

Nile shrugs, uselessly, given that she can't be seen. She is a bit out of the loop when it comes to film and television, uninterrupted hours a precious commodity. “I’ve always been more of a music person.”

__

Booker hums a few bars of something. Nile can’t place the tune.

__

In the end, she realises he’s never seen some of her childhood favourites, and gives him an extensive back catalogue to work through. “This is quite the assignment, Book,” she warns. 

__

"I'm here for a long time, not a good time," he says, and Nile laughs until she gets the hiccups.

Briskly unfolding a home from its sleeping state, Nile realises she has quickly become a dab hand at making up and breaking down apartment after apartment, safehouse after safehouse. She helps pull dust sheets off of furniture and changes what is by her count the ninth set of bedlinen she's slept in that month. She vocally registers an opinion on this and is told to be grateful they haven't stayed in the lighthouse yet, where the washing machine is four flights of stairs away from the bedrooms.

__

This time, though, they're in an AirBnB. She got to pick it, which was an exercise in patience. The decision had to be primarily made based on beneficial defensible characteristics like small windows, an intercom and a manned front desk, which meant that lots of neutral secondary traits slipped through. There are plate glass mirrors on what seems to be, conservatively, every single surface. There's also a giant shag rug in the centre of the living room.

__

The term 'groovy' gets thrown around, which physically pains Nile but she gamely refuses to let it show because that would, of course, mean that they're _winning_.

__

All of her prep is for naught when their recon gets them killed. They scoped out a decommissioned factory site giving off suspiciously high thermal readings, and unsuspectingly brought a tracker back as a souvenir. Nile takes a dumdum bullet to the meat of her shoulder which essentially liquifies it on impact, but on the positive side her bloodcurdling scream at least gets Andy to hit the deck pretty sharply.

__

There's a hot moment when the barrage of incoming shots temporarily stop, where Nile watches her blood pool thickly on the rug and thinks, nonsensically, that it's a shame they'll loose their security deposit.

__

Then there's the sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs, warm hands hauling her up and pressing a weapon into her hands, and she goes to work.

They don’t touch the US - not yet. Nile never asked, but the law of large numbers suggests something should have come up there by now. She could handle it, she knows, but she is grateful she does not have to. 

Nile used to know what home was. It was red brick and mortar, a bedroom she shared with her brother until she was thirteen and a picture on the mantlepiece. Now home isn't a place anymore, or maybe she's just realised it never was. If it _is_ a physical space it's no building, but rather the tubes of her heart and the alveoli in her lungs. Home has become a series of heartbeats the world over - two in one place, three in another, one somewhere else and one always far below the ocean - that echo her own.

__

When it rains on a child's pastel drawing, like one on the blacktop out back of an old Chicago walk-up, colour smears out around the edges and pulls little parts of the picture in all directions.

She’s with Joe, hiding in a fucking cupboard, pointing a shotgun out the crack in the door like a _Looney Tunes_ skit. He has the sights trained on the entryway on the other side of the room. Nile has pins ready to pull on two smoke bombs. 

In absentminded concentration, Nile quietly hums out the nameless tune that’s been going around her head. 

“Frank Sinatra.”

“Huh? What?”

She can see in a sliver of incoming light that Joe dips his head to the side, a hands-full version of pointing at her. “That song. _'You Make Me Feel So Young'_.”

Nile is facing active enemy combatants, so shelves her response and deals with the problem at hand. She spits out the spare shotgun shell she’d been holding between her teeth and hisses in an urgent whisper. “You didn’t recognise Beyoncé but you clocked _that_?!”

Against her shoulder, she can feel him shrug. “I keep up-to-date with that pop culture most likely to make Nicolò want kiss me, and to end up with us all getting into a fight, in that order.”

In Tel Aviv Nile’s skin is painted in rainbow shades by the coloured fans above the entrance to Carmel Market, where she puts several hours of tutelage and Google Translate practice to use to buy kubaneh, zhug, and tomatoes to grate into a pureé.

Joe and Andy are swept away from the moment they arrive, some meeting or plan or ploy that will be carried off more smoothly by their particular faces. She and Nicky are loose ends, and spend the better part of two days waiting by the radio and worrying their fingernails down before Nicky stands, abruptly, and asks if she would like to get out for a bit.

They are in the car for four hours; they sit in comfortable silence for long stretches, interspersed with games of I Spy, and Nile winds down the window with jerky movements to sample the old book dust smell of the low pale grasses. Andy may operate motor vehicles like someone who long ago forgot how to fear death, but Nicky is a fine driver. Small oases bloom into view across the horizon in emerald greens, and they arrive at one such small thriving community. 

“Nicky,” Nile asks eventually, as she follows his confident boot steps from the car, “where are we going?”

“I am going to visit Methuselah.”

Methuselah, an information panel on a waist-high fence tells her, is a 15 year-old tree sprouted from a 2000 year-old seed. The Judean date palm almost disappeared after the fourteenth century AD from a combination of climate change and infrastructure decline, and this particular cultivar of the fruit had been lost to time. 

Nicky comes up next to her. His hands are in his pockets, and his shoulders are set straight. “I put money towards this back in the early 90s. Just a little funding to get the project off the ground. For Joe, and Andy," his voice is steady as always, but a little softer than normal when it finishes, “and for Lykon, most of all.”

All at once, Nile feels robbed. She should have met this man. She has wished and pined for this before. The ghost of his easy smile is an empty place setting at a table she is forced to dine at every day. There is so much he could have taught her, Nile knows. He is missed like a phantom limb. 

Nicky grips her shoulder, and eventually they walk on.

Nile reads up more, when she gets back to the hotel. When Methuselah flowered male, he declared himself as being unable to bear fruit. But there are plans to pollinate him a companion, grown of a seed from the same batch, or bring in close the tree’s extant relative. Should even these things not come to pass, this young plant forms a new legacy from a long history. 

A few months ago, Booker texted her about the sequoias. Now, Nile recalls the leathery frond of Methusalah’s leaves between her thumb and index finger, and feels at once infantile and uniquely ancient. 

"I bought these huge perspex earrings. They're shaped like actual real-size orange slices. They match my dress. Which is also orange."

__

"That sounds... bold."

__

"Uh, no way. I refuse to take comments on my fashion sense from a man who read one article entitled _How To Wear Layers_ back in like 2005."

__

" _Non, non_ ," he says, fervently, palpably sincere. "You look very nice."

__

"Booker," Nile says slowly, like something dawning, "you can't actually _see_ me."

__

The line goes abruptly dead.

__

Nile pulls the phone away from here ear to check and sees that he has, without warning, hung up on her. 

“No, no,” Andy insists, “Nicky, say that again.”

Busy blinking away tears, Nile adds, “I also absolutely need to hear you say that again.”

A set of playing cards are abandoned on the table, long after the memories of a bloody and violent day were abandoned at the door.

Joe is kneeling on the floor, rubbing a thumb over the denim of Nicky’s jeans. He is, assumedly, trying to offer moral support. His face is painted with the kind of deep, earnest adoration that one can only plumb when someone you love is being utterly and despicably dense.

Nicky, for his sins, has his face buried into his wine glass like a horse with an oat bag. He extracts it, temporarily, to offer a rebuttal. “Stop laughing. You’re all being very cruel.”

“I just can’t believe you thought the armadillo lived in the _sea_ ,” Nile gasps, hand on her chest, winded like a regency lady.

From her position the floor, Andy loosely slaps her arm up against Nile’s thigh. “Like a crustacean.”

“Does it not have a shell!? A segmented shell!?” In the earnestness of his defence, Nicky gesticulates wildly, and red wine sloshes on to the carpet. “Not everyone spent the last _thousand_ years keeping abreast of the taxonomical _whimsies_ of every so-called evolutionary biologist!”

All this does is send Nile off into another round of laughter. Through where Andy is leaning back against her legs, she can feel the shakes of her frame from her own barely suppressed mirth.

Nicky’s still not done. 

“Charles Darwin married his cousin, you know, if that does not suggest enough abo-" 

It is at this point that _Joe_ folds, manfully stifling a quirk at the corner of his mouth by shoving his face into his shoulder, and Nicky groans in pained defeat. He reaches to cup Joe’s jaw, and Andy smiles as she moves to start shuffling for the next game. 

“When you talk to me,” Nile asks, “are you doing it as a way to stay a part of everything?”

Down the line, Booker makes a little _huff_ sound. “In the beginning, yes. A little.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m doing it to talk to you.”

Joe raps his knuckles against the metal surface of the chiller unit, five beats for _shave and a haircut_. A moment later the responding _two bits_ echoes from within the bottom left corner of the morgue wall, and he springs into action.

He pulls out the drawer. “Hello, my love.”

“It is very nice, as always, to see your face,” Nicky says with an upside down smile. He slides up into a sitting position and twists so his legs are hanging off the gurney. He keeps the thin paper sheet folded politely over his lap.

“Nabbed your stuff back.” It is with regret that Nile passes over a labelled ziplock bag containing, primarily, cargo pants. She feels kind of bad for all her mocking of his camping eurotrash dad fashion but, honestly.

When he stands to pull them on Andy hip checks the drawer shut. “You good?” she asks, crossing her arms to lean against the adjacent cold stores. 

Joe nudges her a little to the side, and pulls off the clipboard hanging on the end of what was Nicky’s drawer. He reads the front page then flicks overleaf. “You were down as an organ donor. Shame.”

“Maybe Copley can work something out.” Andy employs the diplomatic tone of someone who has been having this discussion for decades and is repressing elation at the prospect of outsourcing responsibility. “Nicky - you good?”

Now finished buttoning his shirt, Nicky looks up. “All in one piece.”

He goes to pull his socks on, but has to first battle with the toe tag. Nile distracts everyone from witnessing this indignity by holding a finger aloft. “Hold up,” she asks, thoughts percolating. “I had my appendix out as a kid. Do I have a _new_ one?”

“You know,” ponders Joe, “I’m not actually sure.”

He takes the pages and returns the clipboard to its little hook. He rips them in half, then in half again, and pushes the pieces into his pocket. Nicky finally ceases hopping on the spot.

In the corridor outside the morgue, an alarm starts blaring. 

“Time to go,” Andy instructs. She racks the slide of her pistol and tucks it in to the back of her jeans. Nile ardently wishes that she wouldn’t do this, but supposes that very old habits probably die pretty hard.

They’re roosting in the branches of a sniper’s nest; an apartment a few floors below the rooftop from which, in but a few hours, Nicky will shoot and Nile will perform some amateur acrobatics with a grappling hook. It’s across the road from a parliamentary banquet hall. This is her first ever assassination attempt which, before anything else can be addressed, is simply a wild statement to even conceive, but secondarily is leading her to some pretty complicated feelings.

The unfortunate though not undeserving target is a career politician; largely ornamental but a key piece in a larger chess game, his intended signing of tonight’s executive order would disintegrate human rights law and plunge the fates of thousands across nearby contentious borders into the line of fire. His execution has been carefully chosen for maximum destabilising effect on his party, a fact which probably wouldn’t reassure him but does at least make Nile feel a little better about the whole thing. 

And all for power. The accumulated greed is repugnant, and makes a confused wave of bile rise in her throat. 

_I want,_ thinks Nile. _I want so damn much._ The longer she lives the more she will desire to grow, the more she will hunger and collate and protect close to her chest like the increasing gravity of a planetary body ensnaring passing satellites. _I want to save children and to rescue Quynh and to see New England in the fall. I want to help people who look like me and to stop climate change and to hold my mom’s hand one more time._

Andy looks over their group. “You want food yet?”

There is a softly affirmative chorus, so Andy retrieves a takeout menu held to the refrigerator with a novelty magnet. Eyes flicking between the paper and her phone as she types out the number printed at the top, her question is absentminded. “Bao, prawn sui mai, turnip cake?”

Nile raises her voice. She restrains the urge to raise her hand. “Can you add custard buns?” 

Andy blinks. “Sure,” she says eventually, the word falling from her mouth under its own weight. She returns the menu to the fridge one handed, holding it against the surface with the heel of her hand and shuffling the magnet over with careful fingers. “Hi, yeah. Can we order to collect?”

There’s a twelve hour time difference between them; not much, in the grand scheme of things, but significant nonetheless. Booker is literally half a world away, describing the lightening dawn while a twin sunset paints the version of the sky that is above Nile's hotel balcony. 

“If you could come back,” she asks, knowing it is not her hypothetical to offer, but the words coming easy in this liminal half-light, “would you?” 

“Now?” Booker’s voice is gentle. Less sad, than it was before, but still serious. “Maybe not. I’m working on some things.” 

Nile hums a questioning tone. “Such as?” 

“I’ve been trying to fix myself. Only problem is I don’t want to be the person I was before. So I suppose that means I need to become someone new,” he says, “and I haven’t quite figured out who that is, yet.”

“You’ve got time.”

There’s a little puff of breath over the line, small and intimate as if it’s in her ear, and she surpasses a shiver. “Guess I do.”

They’re quiet for a little while. The sun stubbornly refuses to tip the evening into night, but already the complex swirls of colour that catch in the clouds are ringed by blue-black and stars. Soon this part of forever will end, and her next adventure will begin.

Staring out into the horizon, she asks, “What else?”

“ _Hmm_?” 

“You said ‘things’, plural.”

The little puff of breath pulls back in with a sharp inhalation, like the sea.

“I’m beginning to fall in love with you. And I don’t want to apologise for that, not when it finally feels like I'm doing something right. But I’m - _hah_ , I’m trying out this new thing where I think about other people. So I need to know where we go from here.”

“I’m not in love with you,” Nile says softly. “But I have a feeling I'm going to be, one day.”

“One day,” repeats Booker, as the sun sets. He then says, sounding peaceful, as it surely comes up again, “I look forward to it.”

**Author's Note:**

> **Notes/references:**
> 
> \- For her side of this story, Nile doesn't have a problem she needs to fix or anything she needs to atone for - but she does have a long life ahead of her, and I wanted to explore her trying to get a handle on what that means. That said, you don't have to get everything figured out right away!
> 
> \- [Texting skin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434845/chapters/14729722) by CodenameCarrot and La_Temperanza, and all images used are from sources labelled free for non-commercial reuse. Title, and series title, from ['Isn't It Time'](https://youtu.be/IZ_DFwAYx30?t=6), because Nile deserves her own Beach Boys deepcut. 
> 
> \- I'd like to take this moment to a) plug my [Book of Nile playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0oXli36cBeNchj9CCXjufK?si=aav6ei0PR1-GFpjzhb_tDA) because turns out that the emotive, positive potential of this relationship makes me absolutely bonkers yonkers, and b) disclaim that I do, in fact, [hate it here](https://jesterthepink.tumblr.com/post/627364449516421120/the-book-of-nile-manifesto).
> 
> \- I'm on tumblr, also at [shortcrust](https://shortcrust.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
